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Embracing the Truth

Openness to truth where truth may be found is a long-standing virtue that worked on the assumption that there is such a thing as objective truth, to which we should be open. Students of higher education now taught one overarching virtue: to be “open.” The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—an openness, a relativism that eschews any form of fixed objective values or truth. Its simplistic creed is that there are no absolutes.

Without objective standards of truth, we are left with feelings, impressions, and intuitions that can never be judged as either false or bad. The bottom line of such an approach is not merely ignorance and skepticism, but the ultimate dehumanization of persons. If everybody is right, then nobody is right. If every viewpoint is equally valuable, no viewpoint is valuable.

As members of the body of Christ, we face twin enemies, both of which are deadly. First, we are tempted to embrace the thought patterns of the secular world in order to be modern and relevant in our thinking. We are terrified of being perceived as being “out of it.”

Second, we may be tempted to a new form of monastic isolationism, in which we surrender science, logic, and education to the secular world while we try to live an empty, discontent faith on an island of religious feeling.

Either option ends at the cemetery with a morbid funeral service for truth. A burial is a decent thing to do for a body that has been left where it was slain.

Coram Deo

Examine your own life: Are you tempted to embrace the thought patterns of the secular world in order to be modern and relevant in your thinking? Are you living an empty, discontent faith in monastic isolation?